This invention relates to a process and device for providing a long-lasting, easy-to-maintain, reduced-cost bedding for animals which are kept in stalls, through use of a sterile particulate pelletized sawdust bedding in conjunction with a novel tool for performing the sifting of manure droppings and urine-clumped material from the bedding. In its preferred form, the invention provides a converted pelletized material that provides safer footing for animals than pellets that have recently been introduced in this field.
For a considerable period of time, livestock animals that are normally confined in stalls or pens have been provided with bedding material of natural straw. Such stalls, whether using straw bedding or newer materials which have come into use during the last 15-20 years, naturally require frequent removal of manure not only for the health and birthing of the animals, but also to reduce noxious odors and piles of manure associated with animal husbandry.
A major problem associated with straw is that when using it as bedding for horses for example, when cleaning a stall, manure and straw are picked up together with a pitchfork having wide spaces between the tines. The fork must enter the straw beneath the droppings, and whatever straw is also picked up is disposed of along with the manure. Both the manure and the straw are placed in a wheelbarrow and transported to a manure pile. Although care is taken to remove as little of the straw as possible, much is lost during manure removal. Periodically, the manure pile must be disposed of, either by being sold or given away for use as fertilizer, or by being buried as landfill. The higher the percentage of straw that is present in the manure pile, the less desirable and valuable it becomes as fertilizer. Composting time is also a problem. Together, these factors require some manure to become landfill. Landfill burial is of major concern to the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States Government. As a result, efforts are being made nationwide to reduce or eliminate use of straw as horse bedding.
When raising or keeping horses, depending on the type of horse being kept or raised, the bedding may be completely stripped daily or weekly, the former typically being the normal schedule for valuable thoroughbred horses and the latter being that maintained for general equines. Thusly, the cost and storage of straw, the extent to which it is lost in stall cleaning and the size of manure piles and their disposal are problems faced by all in the field.
During the past few decades, two additional types of bedding have come into fairly regular use. One common type is pine or cedar wood shavings or chips, the other being sawdust. Each has its advantages and disadvantages in comparison to straw and to each other. Since shavings and sawdust are small or fine in comparison to the long strands of straw, some sifting can take place during manure removal, resulting in considerably less of the bedding material being thrown out with the manure. However, since the normal tine spacing of typical forks used to remove the manure is between nine-sixteenths of an inch and one inch, much of the manure that has dried somewhat and been trampled by the horse moving around in the stall is also sifted through the fork and remains with the shavings or sawdust bedding after the stall has been cleaned. For obvious reasons of cost and cleanliness, it is undesirable to let manure particles smaller than one inch or a half-inch remain in the stall after a maintenance cleaning, and be removed only at such time as the stall is completely stripped. While sawdust can easily sift through the tines and return to the bedding, shavings, if of a length greater than the tine spacing and lying crosswise of the tines, will be thrown out with the manure and somewhat reduce the bedding volume at each stall cleaning. Like straw, a bed of shavings must be completely stripped at least weekly and a new bed started with fresh material. Wood shavings typically have aromatic hydrocarbons that can be detrimental to a horse""s health, particularly its respiratory system. Further, shavings are subject to bacterial growth and retention of the noxious ammonia odor of urine as well as that of manure. Resins and natural oils from the shavings may prevent the manure from being used for fertilizer unless composted for a considerable period. If manure that is not properly composted is spread on a field too early, lime must frequently be spread over the manure to sweeten the soil, further adding to overall cost.
A typical problem with sawdust bedding is the inconsistency in size of the particles, its normally large moisture content which may be as little as 16% but as much as 90% and the amount of long splinters frequently found in sawdust bedding. Splinters may be more than two to four inches in length. The finer particles of sawdust, if they dry out in low humidity areas, can cause respiratory problems, referred to in the horse raising industry as the xe2x80x9cheavesxe2x80x9d. Except for the splinters, sawdust sifting can ordinarily be accomplished easily, leaving a fair percentage of the bedding behind during stall cleaning. But with existing manure forks, a high percentage of small, trampled manure particles are also left behind after cleaning a stall, resulting in a degraded bedding that may be required to be stripped more frequently for a high quality horse. The coat of some horses can even be stained or discolored by manure particles left behind. Sawdust is also subjected to the same detrimental oil or resin aspects of wood shavings with respect to the required length of time it takes to compost manure before it can be used as fertilizer.
Shavings and sawdust use results in a considerable reduction in the size of manure piles as compared to straw. But the increase of composting time of these wood products collected with manure makes their use as fertilizer less attractive. This can result in a higher percentage of manure that is contaminated with shavings and sawdust being directed to landfill disposal.
To a much lesser extent, other bedding materials have been tried with varying degrees of success. Peanut shells and grasses are but a few examples.
A few years ago, there was introduced to the horse husbandry trade in Canada a fourth type of bedding. A distributor of a cat litter material that was made from sawdust compressed into quarter-inch diameter hardened cylindrical pellets initiated use of the product for horse bedding. It was sold in 30# bags at around $6-$7 U.S. per bag and is achieving ever-increasing success. As these hardened pellets acquire moisture, they fluff up perhaps four times in volume into granulated sawdust. In cooperation with the Canadian distributor, I began experimentation with the pellets for the U.S. market. Friends and acquaintances who saw, heard or were told what I was doing greeted my efforts with considerable skepticism. They were aware that the pelletized sawdust material was considerably more expensive than other bedding materials used in the trade at the time. And although I realized that the pellets were sterilized during their processing by having pine tar resins and oils removed, I did not fully appreciate the advantageous labor and material savings implications of the sterile condition of the material. The sawdust is said by the distributor to, be dried for thirty minutes at 800xc2x0 F. and then cooled to 145xc2x0 F. It is then subjected to approximately 20-30,000 pounds pressure per square inch during extrusion into the quarter-inch diameter pellets, increasing the temperature back to 200xc2x0 F. until the pellets produced finally cool to ambient temperature. Resulting pellets are about one-half inch in length. The end product has been sold for horse bedding by Woody Pet Products, Inc., of 15061 Marine Drive, White Rock, British Columbia, Canada for the last few years. When Woody Pet began commercializing the cat litter as horse bedding, and to this day to the best of my knowledge, the only relatively satisfactory means of cleaning smaller pieces of trampled manure from the bedding was to use a relatively expensive motorized electrical vibrating sifter directly in the stall. Such a sifter is sold by the previously-mentioned Woody Pet Products under the common law trademark THE GREEN MACHINE. In order to use this sifter, not only must the sifter be manually moved on wheels from stall to stall, but the horse must be moved out of a stall beforehand, secured elsewhere and returned to the stall after cleaning and removal of the sifter. These operations require time and labor cost. If a horse is the least bit skittish, it likely cannot tolerate being around a noisy vibrator. Furthermore, use of the vibrator was subject to the usual difficulties associated with long electrical extension cords and the location and availability of electrical outlets. A motorized vibrator also has a tendency to reduce dried manure into smaller pieces, causing such smaller pieces to pass through the sifting screen. This returns excessive manure that would otherwise be removed back to the bedding, causing unwanted bedding degradation. Not only is the vibrating sifter relatively costly, but its size, weight and lost time associated with its use appears to have limited its effectiveness in the trade.
There is also a manual tool commonly referred to as a scoop shovel that is capable of sifting small manure particles from sawdust, but it is difficult to use because it has a blunt shovel-type edge instead of tines. Without tines, it cannot freely enter the sawdust beneath manure. The scoop shovel has small diamond-shaped sifting openings over its entire bottom surface, much like common expanded metal. It is believed to be of very little benefit in cleaning stalls because of the difficulty of using the shovel to freely enter and pick up both sawdust and manure.
U.S. Design Pat. No. 406,413 granted to Anthony N. Russo on Mar. 2, 1999 for a Horse Mucking Rake and the same inventor""s utility U.S. Pat. No. 5,417,044 issued May 23, 1995 are used with wood chip bedding according to the disclosure of the latter. As such, their tine spacing if used with pelletized bedding will permit a substantial amount of manure particles to pass through the tines. This tends to degrade the bedding prematurely both in discoloration and potential increase of retained bacteria.
Another problem I have discovered in connection with using the pellets as sold by Woody Pet it that they are what I call being xe2x80x9crollyxe2x80x9d underfoot. The half-inch long hardened pellets tend to act like roller bearings while still in solid form, i.e., before absorbing moisture and fluffing into sawdust. This can result in an unsure footing and possible injury to the horse or to a person in the stall. A fresh bed of the half-inch pellets has the potential of being uncomfortable to a horse.
The problems of being able to clean the pelletized bedding to the greatest degree possible without scaring the horse through use of a vibrator, and of reducing the rolliness of the product while still in the hard cylindrical stage remained unsolved by the prior art.
Animal manure is removed from a bedding material consisting of compacted and compressed pelletized sawdust particles or granules of preferably a relatively uniform size by a pellet fork specifically designed to enable the pellets or particles to sift through the tines of the fork while retaining all but the tiniest particles of manure atop the tines for disposal. The pellet fork is uniquely and specifically designed to provide an improved sifting function not previously possible with other bedding materials except when using a mechanized sifter, resulting in substantial material and labor cost savings, longer life and easier maintenance of bedding, reduction of cleaning time per stall, improved cleanliness of stalls and attendant improved health of the animals. The volume of waste and bedding removed from a horse stall during cleaning may be reduced as much as 70% compared to conventional use of straw.
It is a principal object of the invention to provide for comparatively low cost maintenance of livestock bedding while resulting in a cleaner, healthier stall and animal, by removing an increased percentage of manure and a reduced volume of bedding material at each stall cleaning.
An ancillary object is to improve the environment by reducing the size of manure piles, therefore reducing the volume of waste going into landfill.
Another object is to provide a unique bedding material for such livestock, and to provide a novel tool for enabling cleaning the stall in a shorter time period than heretofore with other known bedding materials.
A further object is to reduce labor cost in cleaning manure from a horse stall by using a manual tool which allows the horse to remain in its stall during cleaning.
A specific object is to provide a novel pelletized horse bedding and pellet fork, which, when used in conjunction with each other, result in a cleaner bedding that can be maintained in that condition for longer periods than heretofore-known horse beddings.
A further object is to provide compressed pelletized animal bedding that assures a more secure footing for an animal while the pellets are still in a hardened condition.
A related object is to use a pellet fork with uniform-size compacted sawdust pellet particles, which fork has tine spacing slightly exceeding the particle size, thus resulting in minimum removal of pellets with animal manure when cleaning stalls.
Another object is to effectively remove manure when cleaning a stall, reducing the volume of a manure pile by as much as 70% compared to straw. Related to this object is the advantage of using only a hand-carried pail rather than a wheelbarrow to remove manure from a stall.
Still another object is to provide pelletized material that is capable of fluffing into sawdust more rapidly than existing similar product when exposed to liquid contact.
Another object is to substantially reduce the cost of pelletized animal bedding by removing a higher percentage of manure than any existing fork known, thus extending bedding life.
Other objects will become apparent from the following description, in which reference is made to the accompanying drawings.